Search This Blog

Sunday, 26 October 2014

DNA

DNA stands for Deoxyribonucleicacid.

Nucleic acids, such as DNA and RNA, were first isolated by Friedrich Miescher in 1867, but he did not suspect their role in heredity at the time.

James D. Watson and Francis Crick announced to friends on February 28, 1953 that they had determined the chemical structure of DNA; the formal announcement took place in Nature on April 25th. In the early 1950s, Watson and Crick were only two of many scientists working on figuring out the structure of DNA.

Rosalind Franklin is the unsung hero of DNA research. Her X-ray Crystallography allowed her colleagues Watson and Crick to accurately characterize the double helix. Many believe she should’ve shared in their Nobel prize.

Crick was on LSD when he came up with the idea of the double-helix shape for DNA.

In 1883 the quagga became extinct. In 1984, it became the first extinct animal to have its DNA sequenced.

The first criminal to be caught as a result of mass DNA screening was Colin Pitchfork who raped and murdered two girls, the first in Narborough, Leicestershire, England, in November 1983, and the second in Enderby, also in Leicestershire, in July 1986. He was arrested on September 19, 1987, and sentenced to life imprisonment on January 22, 1988, after admitting both murders.

In 1998, a nematode worm became the first animal to have its DNA completely sequenced.

German police identified in 2007 the DNA of a woman who had committed six murders. Fearing this unknown killer, they offered a 300,000 euro reward for her capture. In 2009, she was identified. She worked at the factory that manufactured the DNA swabs.

The United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 2013 that naturally occurring DNA sequences cannot be patented.

Adult human DNA was cloned for the first time within an unfertilized egg in April 2014.

The DNA of anyone is 99.9 per cent identical to that of anyone else. It’s the other 0.1 percent that makes one person different from another.

CBP chemist reads a DNA profile to determine the origin of a commodity.

To store all the DNA in the world, it would take 1 sextillion supercomputers.

It would take 600,070 pages of A4 paper to print out the entire human DNA genome. And that's only if you managed to squeeze 4,500 pairs of letters onto each page.

If your DNA was stretched out it would reach to the moon 6,000 times.

All the DNA in the world would weigh about 50 billion tons.

DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and so on.

While you inherit DNA from both parents, you end up using your father's DNA more — genetically, you are more like your father than your mother.

An "Immortality Drive" orbiting the Earth contains the DNA of Stephen Hawking, Stephen Colbert, and Lance Armstrong, in case the world ends.